Tag: me

The spirits I called

Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

This strikes home with my experience helping to build different tools over the years.
I finally got around to read shirkys longish essay about groups being their worst enemy. There is too much good material in the piece to give it justice with commentary, so I will just quote interesting paragraphs instead.

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice.

It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. 2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. 3.) You need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense 2-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.

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6 sagittarians

i woke up this morning at 6:00, on a couch too short for my frame. 3.5h of sleep notwithstanding, i felt quite tired, but this was the day of the seminar. the seminar i had dropped the ball on during apachecon. the seminar that i had spent the day before anxiously preparing, repeatedly screwing up over the course of a 15h workday. what seminar you are asking?

Wyona and QUOIN are partnering to offer your department a one-day workshop on Content Management with Apache Lenya. This is an
opportunity to gain valuable hands-on skills and receive coaching from
experienced Lenya developers. Our approach is to build an example site
that takes advantage of the advanced authoring and publishing
capabilities of the framework. Participants will learn important design
and implementation techniques that can be applied on their own projects.
Wyona and QUOIN are strong supporters of open source content management.
We focus on Apache Lenya as a platform for our consulting and product
development efforts because it provides a robust, powerful, and
standards-compliant solution. The purpose of the workshop is to help
build a local user community for Apache Lenya, and to share our
experience in using this platform.
Gregor J. Rothfuss
General Manager, Wyona
Brad Kain
President, QUOIN

so yes, i step out of the apartment, and sure enough, first snow. and, as always, utter chaos on the road. what to do? i decided to jog from arlington to porter square given that a seminar without a presenter does not sell too many consulting gigs. 20min into the jog, i still had not been passed by a bus. no wonder with the total traffic jam. it was actually a nice, brisk early morning exercise. the road was totally flat, a thin snow cover cushioned my steps way better than nike airs would have, and the slow or nonexistent driving exuded peace. granted no one was feeling the love, and many loiterers in bus stops i passed had a curious expression indeed.
i made it to the seminar only 1h late, and people started to trickle in shortly afterwards. my misfortune with the cute little cd-roms that would not work with contemporary drives was quickly resolved by the unexpected harvard.edu connectivity, and i got going. never mind my totally insufficient preparation, i managed to entertain and educate my audience over the course of the next 8 hours. which was a utter surprise to me.
hi to all my online friends who added an extra element of comic relief by chatting me up during my seminar. their popups graced the big screen. best in show goes to doug for his “hey i found your coat” message that actually drew laughter from the crowd.
i hit the john harvard brew pub with william afterwards. sure enough, we ran into a pocket of sagittarians that took us under their wings to celebrate the deep astrological bonds we share. free beer, yay. amen.